A grandmother and her grandaughter strode through the streets of one of Hephaestus’s oldest domes, newly repaired and made habitable once more. An electronics store had wall-mounted screens on display in its front window, and the child stopped to look, pointing at the man on screen. Anyone would be able to easily recognize the man as the Hero of Hephaestus. The grandmother stopped as the child excitedly pointed at the man. Men like him and the current Governor had given her hope, something she had given up on years ago.

The grandmother smiled and nodded as her grandaughter jabbered on about how amazing she thought the man was. Her thoughts drifted to some of the interviews of folks who had been thinking of running against them. They had all ended their campaigns after debating him in public. His vision was clear, and no one could argue that it was against their interest. But more than that, the man had a force of will that made you think he could get the job done no matter what. It reminded her of the ancient stories from Earth, about wise and powerful heroes who led their people to peace and prosperity.

Unexplored System – 646f6e6f7477616b65746865736c656570657273

VNP - 746869737368697077696C6C6469657468697363686170746572 began it’s wake up procedures as it neared it’s destination. It verified its serial number that designated the time and location relative to Sol that it was brought online. It had been the third probe created by the original probe sent to explore the stars. It felt no pride in this information, its AI was purposefully too primitive to allow such thoughts. Humanity had learned from its mistakes and deigned to not repeat them again.

The probe gently surfaced from subspace on the very edge of the system it had been traveling to. It was a smaller vessel, a mere two hundred meters long and one hundred meters wide. The general shape of the vessel was ovoid, a shape that was interrupted by the front of the ship, which looked as if it had been squashed flat by some abrupt collision. Four bulbous pods embedded halfway down the length of the ship and equidistant from each other were the only other discernible feature of the vessel.

The front began to retract, revealing it to be a hangar as the ship embarked on its mission. It would remain at the edge of the system as scout drones flew out and began to investigate the system. They were launched on ballistic trajectories from the ship and would passively scan the system as they traveled through. In the meantime, the ship itself would collect what data it could on the edge of the system with its own passive sensors.

After months of waiting, the drones reported back that they had found nothing on passive sensors and the probe ordered them to begin active scanning. The drones turned up their miniature reactors and began actively scanning their surroundings as they organized themselves to engage in a standard search pattern. That was when it began to go wrong. The data that had eluded the passive scanners of the drones began to come in as the probe awaited on the edge of the system.

The third planet had long ago ceased to be a mere stellar body. It was a massive factory that had been lying dormant until the drones began actively scanning. Interceptors began launching from the factory, and a handful of larger ships took off from hangars embedded in the surface of the planet. One of the ships began heading roughly in the direction of the probe. The probe grabbed what scans it could and fired off a message drone from itself. The drone slipped into subspace, its tiny frame barely making a blip that could be confused for background noise. It would carry the data back to the probes home system. And from there, the data would be routed back jump by jump back to Sol.

The probe, however, could not return. Its core programming would not allow it to lead enemies back to human space. It had other protocols to follow in a scenario such as this one. It selected a large rocky body on the outer edge of the system and began firing equipment on trajectories to intercept it. With any luck, they would reach the stellar body well after the probe was dead and gone, and the enemy would not think to look for the heat signatures of the rockets that would decelerate the factories and miners that were currently drifting in space.

With its load lightened, the probe turned to its next objective. It had a limited array of armaments, but its most significant weapon was itself. The four pods came to life as the Alcubierre drive squeezed space around the probe, rapidly shifting its position in the system. Its rapid compression of space-time was immediately detected, the ripples it created were easy to detect, and every one of the larger vessels in the system homed in on the probe as it made its way towards the factory planet.

The probe got to the position it required without being intercepted, though the other ships were hot on its tail. Panels retreated from the rear of the ship as a massive cone extended from the rear of the ship. The massive fusion torch lit up, catapulting the probe on a direct intercept course with the planet.

Its attempt to utilize itself as a weapon was in vain as a focused pulse of energy from the planet intercepted the probe. The energy pulse shut down most of its electronics, and what was left barely functioned. The fusion drive was unable to go into a controlled shutdown as the reaction spun out of control, the particles having been excited beyond the norm by the pulse of energy. The probe detonated in the silence between planets.

Several days after the probe was destroyed, the factory planet seemed to have satisfied itself that the system was cleared of intruders and recalled all of its ships, returning to its slumber. Weeks after that, small fusion torches lit up on the edge of the system. Small enough as to not warrant attention, just large enough to decelerate heavy mining and manufacturing equipment as it gently landed and began to unpack. Over the next several months, a factory would expand into the small rock not even worthy of the descriptor ‘planetoid’ and eventually create a computational array for a new probe. It would be necessary to direct operations in the system. After all, there was a threat to humanity in this system, and it must be dealt with.

The message drone swiftly traveled through subspace. Little more than a reactor, a hard drive, and the necessary subspace and ion drives to get around. The subspace drive was oversized compared to the rest of the drone allowing it to traverse the void between stars much faster than most starships. What had taken the probe that had launched it more than a month was completed in just over a fortnight by the tiny drone.

It surfaced from subspace near the edge of the probe’s origin system. It fired up its ion drive, heading straight for the central space station of the system that handled the automated logistics and mining operations. Taking care to avoid the Lagrange points that would be slowly collecting massive caches of mineral wealth, the drone reached the station as quickly as its tiny ion drive could take it.

Upon receiving the drone, the station pulled the contents of the message. It wasn’t intelligent enough to understand the contents, but the priority header that referenced a potential threat to humanity was all the station needed to engage its massive faster than light communications array. The receiving node in Sol acknowledged the message’s receipt, and the automated station, having done its duty, returned to its solemn task of collecting the scattered spaceborne mineral wealth of the system.

In Sol, the message was received and given its header forwarded to a select group of individuals. Upon review, those individuals began the process of informing those elected individuals who would need this information. The former United Systems Alliance, now the ‘United Sol Alliance,’ still insisted on the facade of democracy despite the clearly rigged outcomes of their elections. Far be it from the majority of its citizens to care as long as their lives of luxury went uninterrupted.

The leaders of this planetary alliance found themselves once again faced with the threat of an outside force. The plan of retreating from the colony worlds and allowing them to deal with the threat of the ‘Slugs’ and their client races had worked out rather splendidly. However, this would not be an option if this newly discovered alien race proved to be actively hostile. With only three planetary systems under their control, the whole point of this endeavor had been to find new colonizable systems to expand to.

They needed the strategic advantage of having fallback systems unknown to the Slugs should they succeed in breaking the outer colonies. And if The Avalon and its attendant fleet prevailed against the aliens, then they would likely need to defend against attempts to bring Sol and her allies back into the fold. They knew that they would be on the wrong end of a firing squad if that happened. The outer colonies largely believed that Sol had abandoned them to be destroyed, and they were completely correct.

The Avalon Fleet had already made a half-hearted attempt to bring the United Sol Alliance back into the war, but the fleet stationed in Wolf 359, backed up by extensive defensive emplacements, had been too much for what had almost certainly been a token probing force. They could not rely on the Avalon continuing to allow them to exist separately, and so a Von Neumann Probe had been launched.

It was an act of desperation. The original project had led to humanity’s first interstellar war before they had even discovered FTL. It had been a drawn-out affair that had only ended in humanity’s favor because the original Von Neumann probe had refused to make copies of itself. They had learned to scale back their AI since then, and this project had yielded some fruit. Two colonization targets had already been discovered, but they were both within ten light-years of this new potential threat.

After much debate, it was decided to send a human crewed scout vessel to attempt to survey the system and whatever it contained. They were to obtain as much information as possible without making contact and without being detected. The ship selected for this duty was of a new design and of recent manufacture though it had already been on two successful missions to spy on the warfront between the outer colonies and the Slugs.

It was a small vessel, heavily shielded, and using a trick recently discovered by the United Sol Alliance, could dump all its radiation emissions directly into subspace, effectively erasing its presence in real space. It would take extremely sensitive subspace sensors to detect, and since the United Sol Alliance had never developed sensors that sensitive, they were quite sure the rest of humanity didn’t have sensors that sensitive either. The result of this technology was a ship that was quite literally a void, even in comparison to the vast emptiness that was space. Other tricks that humanity had learned to increase the stealth profile of their various crafts had gone into its construction as well.

What resulted from this amalgamation of nearly every stealth advancement from uncounted hundreds of years of scientific progress was a small, simple-looking vessel. Shaped roughly like a cigar, it relied primarily on a tightly calibrated subspace drive. An ion drive allowed it to make positional adjustments as needed but was lightly used in order to maintain the absolute stealth profile of the ship.

The ship left to investigate this new potential threat to humanity. Its small crew of twenty knew that they would succeed in returning with news. Whether that was ill or not wasn’t for them to decide. They would merely be the messengers. Such was their duty.